A tourist traveling in an unfamiliar city may read reviews of tourist sites, restaurants, hotels, or other locations to determine whether to visit particular locations. Such reviews may be published on review sites, online travel guides, blogs, or elsewhere. Because traditional reviews are manually written by reviewers, such reviews may be based on the subjective recollections of reviewers and may even be biased. In some cases, the editors of a site may review or attempt to verify the factual accuracy of at least some of the reviews published on the site. However, apart from the word of the author, editors currently have no way to independently and objectively verify that the author of a review actually had the positive (or negative) experience while visiting a location as described in the review.
Moreover, travel guide services or reviews currently used by tourists may not necessarily provide individually relevant information due to mismatches between the interests and preferences of tourists and reviewers. Rating systems and reviews may paint a distorted picture of a location or service if a small number of tourists do most of the voting. Moreover, recollections and emotions about travel destinations may change with the passage of time and based on opinions of others or fading recollections. Accordingly, reviews written after the trip may fail to correctly reflect the emotions experienced by the reviewer during the trip. Further, although tourists may have different goals for a trip and may be excited by different aspects of the destination, the reviews posted on review sites may generalize the evaluation of tourist destinations and may lack specific evaluations of particular sites. Thus, tourists may miss potentially interesting sites and instead visit the more commonly visited and more frequently reviewed locations.